Book Chapter: Imagining the Other: Foreigners on the Chinese TV Screen

Imagining the Other: Foreigners on the Chinese TV Screen. In Bai, R & Song, G (Eds.), Chinese Television in the Twenty-First Century: Entertaining the Nation, p. 107-120. New York: Routledge, 2014 How to Cite?

Abstract

As both evidence and a result of the accelerating globalization undergone by Chinese media and Chinese society at large, images of foreigners and foreign countries have nowadays become ubiquitous on the Chinese TV screen. They reflect the popular imagination of the Other and partake in constructing a “modern” and cosmopolitan image of China. Through the Self/Other dichotomy, television has, and continues to, play an important role in articulating a Chinese national identity and promoting Chinese nationalism as an ideology. The chapter focuses on critical readings of images of foreigners in recent popular TV drama serials, in particular, Modern Family and My Natasha in light of the dynamic interplay between nationalism, Occidentalism, and Self-Orientalism.

As both evidence and a result of the accelerating globalization undergone by Chinese media and Chinese society at large, images of foreigners and foreign countries have nowadays become ubiquitous on the Chinese TV screen. They reflect the popular imagination of the Other and partake in constructing a “modern” and cosmopolitan image of China. Through the Self/Other dichotomy, television has, and continues to, play an important role in articulating a Chinese national identity and promoting Chinese nationalism as an ideology. The chapter focuses on critical readings of images of foreigners in recent popular TV drama serials, in particular, Modern Family and My Natasha in light of the dynamic interplay between nationalism, Occidentalism, and Self-Orientalism.

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eng

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Routledge

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Chinese Television in the Twenty-First Century: Entertaining the Nation